JAINISM IN KASHMIR

                                              

JAINISM  IN KASHMIR 

Jainism was present in Kashmir from at least the Mauryan period, though it remained a minor tradition compared to Buddhism and Shaivism. According to both the Rajatarangini of Kalhana and Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari,Emperor Ashoka “first introduced Jainism into the kingdom of Kashmir” during his viceroyalty around 260 BCE. Archaeological and textual evidence confirms a continued, albeit limited, presence: in 932 CE a Kashmiri Shravaka named Ratna founded a Manibimla shrine dedicated to Tirthankara Neminatha on Rajvataka hill. During the Mughal period, Jain monks were part of Akbar’s entourage when he travelled to Kashmir, and the emperor maintained correspondence with the Jain acharya Hiravijaya Suri. Contemporary chroniclers note that Jainism was regarded as one of the “minor religious sects” in the region and “does not appear to have gained very wide popularity”. Xuanzang’s 7th-century account of Kashmir also describes a flourishing centre of education where “various Dharmic Thoughts, like Shaivism, Buddhism, Jainism, Vaishnavism, etc. co-existed”. Thus, while Jainism had temples, scholars and royal patronage at intervals, it functioned in Kashmir primarily as a small Sramana community alongside the dominant Buddhist and Shaiva traditions.

In Kashmir texts and histories,  3 terms are  used for Jains:

1. Shravaka meaning: "Listener / Disciple"  .This is the most common term. It means a lay Jain follower who listens to the teachings of Tirthankaras.  

2. Jaina meaning "Follower of Jina" i.e. Mahavira/24 Tirthankaras  .Used in later texts like Ain-i-Akbari_by Abul Fazl:  

3. Nirgrantha meaning:"One without knots / bonds.  

This is the oldest Buddhist/Jain term for ascetics. Buddha used it for Mahavira and his monks.  

In Sanskrit/Kashmiri chronicles it appears when talking about early Sramana traditions in the Valley.

So all 3 appear, but Shravaka is the one you’ll see most in Kashmiri records for actual people who lived in Kashmir. Kashmir never had a large Jain kingdom, so Jains here are mostly recorded as individual  Shravakas, merchants, or scholars rather than as a ruling community. This is how Rajatarangini  mention Jains as Shravaka.

"तत्रैव राजवटके शैलेऽकारयच्छ्रावको रत्नः ।

मणिबिम्बं जिनेन्द्रस्य नेमिनाथस्य सुन्दरम् ॥"(Taranga 5 of Rajatarangini by Kalhana)

("There itself, on Rajvataka hill, the Shravaka Ratna caused to be made a beautiful jewelled image of Jina, Lord Neminatha.")

Meaning: In 932 CE, a Kashmiri Jain lay follower named Ratna Shravaka built a temple/shrine with an idol of the 22nd Tirthankara, Neminatha, on Rajvataka hill in Kashmir.This proves there was an active Jain community in 10th century Kashmir with patronage to build temples. Kalhana doesn’t use "Jaina" much. The term appears more in later Persian sources like Ain-i-Akbari quoting Kashmiri tradition.Nirgrantha appears in Buddhist texts and pan-Indian Sanskrit literature for Jain monks., Historic Jain texts like the Prabhavakacarita record that the great 12th-century Jain scholar Hemacandra requested grammatical texts from Kashmir's Sharda Shrine ( ancient  seat of learning ) to compile his definitive grammar work, the Siddhahem.

( Avtar Mota )

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ALBERT CAMUS AND MAHATMA GANDHI

                                                                           

ALBERT CAMUS AND MAHATMA GANDHI

Albert Camus never visited India, yet India entered his moral and intellectual imagination through the figure of Mahatma Gandhi. In Gandhi, Camus encountered a form of rebellion fundamentally different from the revolutionary violence that so often transforms liberation into another form of tyranny. Gandhi's resistance to British imperial rule demonstrated that rebellion need not reproduce the violence of the power it opposes; it could remain anchored in moral restraint, self-discipline and the refusal to kill. This was of particular significance to Camus, whose political thought increasingly revolved around the necessity of limits. In 1948, reflecting upon the moral devastation of the Second World War and the violence of the modern age, Camus described Gandhi as “the only great man of our times.” The statement was remarkable. Camus was deeply suspicious of political hero-worship and of the tendency to transform historical figures into infallible symbols. His admiration for Gandhi therefore did not rest simply upon the latter's political success. It rested upon the moral discipline that governed his resistance.

Camus was, at heart, a firm believer in non-violence, not as a doctrine of passivity or submission, but as a moral limit that human beings must not cross, even in the name of justice. He understood that resistance to oppression was necessary; yet he remained deeply suspicious of every ideology that sought to justify murder as the price of a future utopia. It was within this ethical landscape that Mahatma Gandhi assumed a particular significance for him. Camus admired Gandhi not because he accepted Gandhian philosophy wholesale, but because Gandhi embodied the rare possibility of moral action in history without surrendering to the logic of violence. Gandhi had demonstrated that it was possible to resist oppression, struggle for justice and defend the dignity of a people without becoming what one opposed. Yet the moral courage that made such resistance possible did not arise in Gandhi in isolation. It was nourished by a profound and lifelong engagement with the Bhagavad Gita, a text he repeatedly read, studied and heard expounded at his Ashram by distinguished scholars, including Vinoba Bhave. 

The Gita gave Gandhi a spiritual grammar for action: to act without attachment to the fruits of action, to fulfil one’s duty without hatred, and to confront injustice without allowing the struggle against evil to corrupt the soul of the resister. Here, perhaps, lies one of the most significant intellectual and ethical bridges between Camus and Gandhi. Camus encountered the Gita as a text of action without illusion; Gandhi lived its moral discipline as a practice of non-violent resistance. Their paths were therefore not identical, yet they converged around a profound question: how can one act decisively in a violent and unjust world without becoming an instrument of violence oneself? In Gandhi, Camus recognised a figure who had entered history without allowing history to corrupt the human conscience, a moral possibility that, for Camus, remained among the rarest and most precious achievements of the modern age. The Bhagavad Gita, standing between them as a profound spiritual and philosophical bridge, helps illuminate the otherwise unexpected affinity between the Algerian-born French writer and the Indian apostle of non-violence.

Gandhi found the spiritual resources for moral action in truth, ahimsa and his profound reading of the Bhagavad Gita. Camus sought a comparable discipline in lucidity, measure and the ethics of limits. Their meeting, therefore, is not a meeting of doctrines but of moral imperatives. One must rebel, but one must not become what one rebels against. That, perhaps, is where Gandhi's Gita and Camus's revolt come closest; not in metaphysics, but in the difficult ethics of action

( Avtar Mota )

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MY POEM ,"THE LONELIEST ILLNESS "

                                              

THE LONELIEST ILLNESS

There comes an illness

for which medicine has no name.

The body burns.

The fever rises.

The night keeps its own counsel.

But none of this

is the worst.

The worst

is not knowing

whose name to utter

when pain becomes heavier

than the body.

A closed door.

An unanswered call.

A chair beside the bed

that remains

more faithful

than any friend.

Pain can be endured.

Silence cannot.

The flesh heals

according to its season.

Loneliness

has no season.

There comes an hour

when suffering

no longer asks to be cured.

It asks

to be seen.

One hand

upon the forehead.

One voice

breaking the silence.

One human being

to stand between us

and the emptiness.

That is all.

Without it,

even hope

forgets the way.

Perhaps that is why

the deepest illness

is never the one

the physician discovers.

It is the one

that leaves no wound,

only an empty chair,

and a silence

that outlives the fever.

( Avtar Mota )

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NEW HISTORIANS AND SIKANDER BUTSHIKAN

(Ruins of Martand Sun Temple in Kashmir , photo taken in 1868 by John Burke.The Temple was one among hundreds of temples demolished during the rule of Sultan Sikander Butshikan )

 NEW HISTORIANS  AND SIKANDER BUTSHIKAN

The reign of Sultan Sikandar Shahmiri, 1389–1413 CE, occupies a position of considerable clarity within the extant historiography of medieval Kashmir, notwithstanding recent attempts to obscure it. In both the Indo-Persian annalistic tradition  :Baharistan-i-Shahi, Tarikh-i-Firishta, Tohfatu’l-Ahbab and in the Sanskritic continuation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini by Jonaraja and Srivara, he is recorded under the epithet Butshikan,  the Idol-Breaker. The convergence of Persian and Sanskrit testimony on this point is seldom encountered and ought to command the historian’s attention. To recast him as a ruler of toleration by recourse to tendentious translation, and in the absence of any competence in Persian, Sanskrit, or Sharada, is not scholarship but sophistry. Such endeavours do not illuminate the past; they darken it. They constitute a disservice to historical inquiry and to the public understanding of Kashmir’s medieval past.

The Historical Record

The reign of Sultan Sikandar Shahmiri, 1389–1413 CE, is consistently recorded as one of iconoclasm. Persian chronicles and the Sanskritic Rajatarangini continuations concur in designating him Butshikan.The archaeological record affirms this: from Verinag to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the ruins of major temples remain, some repurposed as graveyards, others with later superstructures erected upon their plinths.

Sultan Sikandar's rule  is detailed in Baharistan-i-Shahi, Tarikh-i-Firishta, and Tohfatu’l-Ahbab, and many more texts .  As in the Persian texts, the Sanskrit continuation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini by Jonaraja, and thereafter by Srivara, record with consistency the destruction of temples, the levy of jizya, and measures of religious coercion during his reign. These accounts, written within living memory of the events, constitute our principal indigenous testimony.  To disregard these texts, or to read them through third-party translations alone, is to abandon the basic tenets of historiography.

 The Methodological Failure

A number of present-day commentators who style themselves as intellectuals and historians proceed without competence in the requisite languages : Sanskrit, Sharada, or Persian. Their arguments are constructed upon selective English renderings, taken out of context and made to serve a narrative conceived in advance.  This is not critical history. It is an exercise in presentism. By substituting supposition for textual engagement, they do not clarify the past. They obscure it. In doing so, they perform a positive disservice both to history as a discipline and to the public, whom they render more ignorant rather than enlightened. It is darkness masquerading as light.

Whereas historians employ epigraphy, stratigraphy and scientific dating to test such evidence, the present tendency is one of selective citation and tendentious translation by those without competence in Persian, Sanskrit, or Sharada. This constitutes not revision but fabrication , a narrative of limited circulation that collapses upon first scholarly examination beyond a geographical space . It is a disservice to history.

 The Greater Disservice: The Erasure of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin

What makes this distortion particularly egregious is that it simultaneously belittles the singular legacy of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, r. 1420–1470 CE.  Within the Shahmiri lineage, Zain-ul-Abidin stands apart. The Persian and Sanskrit sources alike : Baharistan-i-Shahi, Tarikh-i-Kashmir, and the later portions of the Rajatarangini tradition  record his policies of religious toleration, the recall of exiled Pandits, the remittance of jizya, patronage of Sanskrit learning, and the translation of the Mahabharata and Rajatarangini into Persian.  

He is the only ruler of that dynasty whom both traditions acknowledge, with near unanimity, as liberal and just. 

By attempting to project the attributes of Zain-ul-Abidin backwards onto Sikandar, these so-called intellectuals do a twofold wrong. They misrepresent Sikandar, and they diminish Zain-ul-Abidin. They collapse the distinction between an iconoclast and a conciliator, and thereby rob Kashmiri history of its nuance. To deny Zain-ul-Abidin his unique status is to do violence to the very record they claim to uphold.

Conclusion 

History cannot be wished into conformity with contemporary preference. It must be read on its own terms, in its own languages. Anything less is not revision. It is reduction.  And to reduce the past in this manner is to fail both the dead and the living.

Should these historians be compelled to operate beyond their parochial remit, one may confidently anticipate further ingenuities. With the same methodological rigour, they would not scruple to advance the proposition that Mahmud of Ghazni did not, in fact, sack Somnath; that the devastation was wrought instead by a most obliging and localised earthquake, confining its attentions to precisely two square miles of temple precinct. Such is the poverty of scholarship that substitutes invention for evidence, and anecdote for archive.

( Avtar Mota )

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WHAT IF ALBERT CAMUS WOULD HAVE MET DR S RADHAKRISHNAN ?

                                                                        

      (AI-generated photo: Camus meets Dr Radhakrishnan)

ALBERT CAMUS WOULD HAVE MET DR S RADHAKRISHNAN HAD HE LIVED 

The two great men in the  above AI generated  picture never met. I don't think they even exchanged letters. Had Albert Camus lived beyond 1960, he would almost certainly have found Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan a fascinating figure to meet. Radhakrishnan was not merely India's President and a distinguished philosopher; he was one of the most important modern interpreters of Indian philosophy for the West. His writings on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Hindu philosophy and the dialogue between Eastern and Western thought would have touched precisely those questions that increasingly occupied Camus: the meaning of action, responsibility, moral freedom, spiritual experience, human suffering and the possibility of ethical life without surrendering lucidity.

For the intellectual world of Camus, Radhakrishnan represented an extraordinary bridge between Greek humanism, European philosophy and Indian wisdom. Camus, who had already shown an interest in the Bhagavad Gita and other Eastern texts, might have recognised in Radhakrishnan a thinker capable of discussing the Gita without reducing it either to exotic mysticism or to an abstract religious doctrine. Radhakrishnan's interpretation of Indian thought as a living philosophy, concerned with the transformation of human consciousness, could have provided fertile ground for a profound conversation with the author of The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel.

One can therefore reasonably imagine that, had Camus survived, a meeting with Dr Radhakrishnan would have been one of the intellectual encounters he might have desired. It would have brought together two men who, despite belonging to different civilisations, were deeply concerned with the same fundamental question: how should a human being live in a world marked by suffering, uncertainty and the absence of easy answers? Camus might have approached Radhakrishnan from the standpoint of lucid revolt; Radhakrishnan might have responded from the standpoint of spiritual insight and the unity of existence.

Such a meeting would have been more than a meeting between a French novelist and an Indian philosopher. It might have become a remarkable conversation between the philosophy of the absurd and the philosophy of the Gita, between Camus's insistence on living without consolation and Radhakrishnan's belief in the stronger possibilities of human consciousness.

Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's attitude towards existentialism was neither one of simple rejection nor of unqualified acceptance. He recognised that existentialism had emerged from the profound spiritual and intellectual crisis of modern Europe and valued its insistence upon confronting existence in its concrete immediacy. Its preoccupation with anxiety, freedom, responsibility, suffering, death and the individual's struggle to create meaning represented, for Radhakrishnan, a serious philosophical response to the disintegration of inherited certainties.

Yet he also believed that existentialism, particularly in its atheistic forms, remained incomplete. Its great merit was its refusal to offer facile consolation; its limitation, from the standpoint of Indian philosophy, was that it often treated the experience of meaninglessness as the final horizon of human existence. Radhakrishnan's Vedantic perspective moved beyond this impasse. Human beings are not merely isolated individuals condemned to confront an indifferent universe; they are spiritual beings whose deepest nature may be disclosed through an experience of reality transcending the ego.

In this respect, Radhakrishnan could have found much to admire in Camus's lucidity, moral seriousness and resistance to nihilism, while questioning whether revolt and ethical responsibility exhausted the possibilities of human existence. Existentialism confronted the abyss with courage; Indian philosophy, Radhakrishnan maintained, asked whether the abyss itself might be transcended through spiritual realisation. The dialogue between Camus and Radhakrishnan would therefore have been one between two profound responses to the crisis of meaning: one grounded in lucid revolt, the other in the possibility of spiritual awakening.

Dr S. Radhakrishnan possessed a profound knowledge of Western philosophy and was familiar with the major intellectual currents of modern Europe. He knew French and engaged with the wider European philosophical tradition, including the debates surrounding existentialism. While it would be difficult to establish without specific documentary evidence that he had read the complete works of Jean-Paul Sartre, his philosophical range was certainly broad enough to have brought him into intellectual proximity with the major French thinkers of the twentieth century. It is precisely this breadth of intellectual sympathy that makes the imagined meeting between Radhakrishnan and Albert Camus so compelling. Camus, the writer of the Absurd, revolt and human solidarity, would have encountered in Radhakrishnan a philosopher who had deeply studied the crisis of Western thought while also drawing upon the profound resources of Indian metaphysics. Their meeting, had history permitted it, might have become a remarkable dialogue between two civilisations and two distinct responses to the human predicament: Camus's lucid defiance before a silent universe and Radhakrishnan's vision of a spiritual reality in which the human search for meaning could find a deeper ground.

The meeting, however, remained confined to the realm of historical possibility. Camus's premature death brought to an abrupt end a life of exceptional intellectual promise, while Radhakrishnan continued, for another fifteen years, to engage with the philosophical, cultural and moral questions of his age. The conversation that might have taken place between them was therefore never realised in history. Yet the absence of an actual encounter need not signify the absence of an intellectual dialogue. Indeed, the very distance between them makes such a dialogue all the more compelling. Camus confronted the human condition through the categories of absurdity, lucidity, revolt and ethical responsibility; Radhakrishnan approached the crisis of modern existence through the philosophical resources of Vedānta and the wider traditions of Indian thought. Their imagined meeting thus acquires significance not as a fanciful exercise in intellectual speculation, but as a symbolic encounter between two distinct philosophical responses to the predicament of modern humanity. What history denied them in person, comparative reflection may still recover in thought.

( Avtar Mota )

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WHY MENTAL COMPATIBILITY IS THE ONLY TRUE RELATION?

                                  

WHY MENTAL COMPATIBILITY IS THE ONLY TRUE RELATION? 

The social order imposes bonds derived from kinship and juridical obligation. Yet the rational faculty inclines toward associations predicated upon truth and psychological compatibility.*  

Thus we encounter the fundamental disjunction between institutional continuity and intellectual affinity.

We are born into a lattice of relationships we did not elect. Kinship is conferred by birth, collegiality by appointment, matrimony often by arrangement, and affiliation by shared interest. From childhood we are instructed in a single ethic: duty, adjustment, compromise, endurance. Yet endurance is not synonymous with living. And physical proximity is not synonymous with communion.The great traditions of both East and West converge upon an uncomfortable observation: *mental consonance constitutes the authentic basis of relation*. Neither social contract, nor familiarity, nor consanguinity, in itself, guarantees it. 

To maintain a measured distance from a relation marked by fundamental incompatibility is not arrogance. It is not egoism. It is, rather, an act of intellectual honesty and self-preservation — a refusal to acquiesce to a state of avoidable and corrosive dissonance.

What the Indian Scriptures Say

(1) The Dhammapada: Guard the Mind, Guard Your Company

The Buddha begins the Dhammapada with this:  

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become." (Dhammapada 1)  

If the mind is everything, then the company we keep is everything too. For the mind is not formed in isolation. It is shaped by the air it breathes, by the conversations, silences, judgements, and values around it. To stay in a relation that dulls, diminishes, or distorts your mind is to betray the very source of your life. That is why the Buddha also said:  

"Better it is to live alone. There is no fellowship with a fool." (Dhammapada 61)  

This is not misanthropy. It is hygiene. The mind, like the body, needs clean air.

(2) The Upanishads: The Self Is the Standard

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives an answer that undoes centuries of social piety:  

"Verily, a husband is not dear because he is a husband, but because the Self is dear. A wife is not dear because she is a wife, but because the Self is dear." (2.4.5)  

A role is not sacred in itself. What is sacred is whether the relation nourishes the Self. To maintain a bond that persistently violates clarity, peace, or growth out of mere duty is himsa, violence against oneself. Dharma is not blind endurance. It is alignment with Satya, truth. And truth begins with the mind.

(3) Yoga Vasishtha: Relation as the Air We Breathe*  

The Yoga Vasishtha is perhaps India’s most psychological scripture. Sage Vasishtha tells Sri Rama:  

"Association with the wise gives rise to wisdom. Association with fools gives rise to folly. Therefore, O Rama, choose your company as you would choose the air you breathe." (Vairagya Prakarana)

(4) Advaita 

Real relation cannot be thrust. It grows only in four conditions:  

1. The sunshine of empathy Karuna, the ability to feel another’s inner weather without fixing it.  

2. The oxygen of resonance without fusion: Anukampa asks for nothing in return. Whatever is due comes automatically by the inherent strength of Anukampa. It does not measure a relation in terms of a delivery expectation matrix.  

3. The food of understanding individuality: Prajna, seeing the other as a separate universe, not as your extension.  

4. The nurturing of individual space: Akasha, the freedom to become without surveillance.  

Where these are absent, no certificate, no blood tie, no social pressure can create a real bond. It becomes a cage. And the Yoga Vasishtha is clear: a gilded cage is still a cage.

(5) Bhagavad Gita 

"Sattve sthito buddhir yā pravṛttiṁ ca nivṛttiṁ ca" (18.30)  

"That intellect by which one knows action and inaction, what should be done and what should not be done" is Viveka. Choosing distance is Nivṛtti, knowing what not to engage in.  

"Uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ" (6.5)  

"Lift yourself by yourself." Protecting your own mind from incompatible company is self upliftment, not ego.

The Western Philosophers: From Solitude to Solidarity

(1) Arthur Schopenhauer was blunt:  

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free."  

"With people of limited capacity, the less one has to do with them, the happier one will be." 

For Schopenhauer, mental energy is capital. To spend it in friction and performance is slow impoverishment. Remaining at a distance is not cruelty. It is conservation.

(2) Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of Gesinnungsgenossen, comrades in disposition. In "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" :  

"One should not crave to be understood. One should only crave to be met by those who are capable of understanding."  

Depth is rare. To dilute yourself to fit a room is to betray your own potential.

(3) Soren Kierkegaard called this "choosing oneself". He writes:  

"The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you will never have."  

To stay in an incompatible bond is to mourn a future that will never arrive. Authenticity demands choice.

(4) Simone de Beauvoir made it ethical. In "The Ethics of Ambiguity" :  

"To will oneself free is also to will others free."  

A relation that requires one person to become smaller is not love. It is mutual imprisonment.

(5) Martin Buber gave us the language to see why so many bonds feel empty. In ,"I and Thou" :  

"All real living is meeting."  

An 'I and It' relation treats the other as a role: "my spouse", "my relative", "my boss". An "I and Thou" relation meets the other as a presence. Mental compatibility is the precondition for 

"I and Thou". Without it, we default to "I and It", and that is where resentment breeds.

(6) Hannah Arendt reminded us of "plurality". In ,"The Human Condition" :  

"Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived."  

Healthy relations do not demand sameness. They honour difference. So compatibility is not uniformity.

(7) Erich Fromm* in ,"The Art of Loving" drew the line:  

"Love is the union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self."  

Where separateness is lost, we get dependence. Where integrity is lost, we get bitterness. Neither is relation.

(8) Albert Camus: The Revolt Against Forced Intimacy:

Albert Camus called modern life "absurd", the human need for meaning meeting a silent universe. In ,"The Myth of Sisyphus", he names three responses: suicide, faith, or revolt.  

A forced relation is killing the truth of your inner experience daily for the sake of continuity. Camus says:  

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."  

By rebellion, Camus means to say: "I will not call this love when my mind starves in it." For Camus, this is not coldness. It is lucidity. Camus asks us to imagine Sisyphus happy, not because the task is pleasant, but because he owns it. He clearly says that we must own the company we keep.

The Test of Compatibility

Mental compatibility is not “we like the same food”. It is tested in four ways:

1. Tempo: Can we sit in silence without anxiety?  

2. Depth: Can we speak of death, failure, and meaning without judgement?  

3. Integrity: After we part, do I feel clearer or more muddled?  

4. Freedom: Do I feel larger, or smaller?  

To remain where you must diminish is to betray yourself and the other. For you are no longer present , only performing.

The lineage

The Dhammapada: guard your mind.  

The Upanishads: know the Self first.  

The Yoga Vasishtha: choose the air you breathe.  

Schopenhauer: guard your mental capital.  

Nietzsche: seek those who can meet you as equals.  

Kierkegaard: choose yourself.  

De Beauvoir: will freedom — yours and theirs.  

Buber: meet, do not use.  

Arendt: honour plurality.  

Fromm: keep your integrity.  

Camus: live honestly.

Conclusion

Ultimately, mental compatibility constitutes the only authentic basis for relation, for it is the sole condition under which one may remain without self betrayal. To remain at a distance from incompatible company is not an act of ego, but of discernment; it is a refusal to acquiesce to needless vexation. Solitude does not destroy us. It is prolonged association with that which is incongruent that diminishes us by degrees. In this, wisdom lies not in endurance, but in the quiet courage to choose alignment over accommodation.

(Avtar Mota)

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CAMUS AND MOULOUD FERAOUN

                                             

(Photo: May 1958, Algiers: Mouloud Feraoun and Albert Camus)

Albert Camus And Mouloud Feraoun

This is a  photo from May 1958 taken in Algiers. On the left is Mouloud Feraoun,  wearing glasses and a light suit. On the right is Albert Camus in a dark suit. By this time Camus had already received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and both men were prominent writers living through the Algerian War.

Mouloud Feraoun was a Kabyle Algerian teacher and writer. He was born in 1913 in a village in Kabylia. He was Muslim, from a Berber family, and his books like ,"The Poor Man's Son" and "Journal" describe everyday village life, education, and the changes happening in Algeria. He wrote clearly and directly about people, not politics, and was respected as a voice of ordinary Algerians.

Camus and Feraoun had real respect for each other. Camus wrote the preface to Feraoun’s "The Poor Man's Son"  in 1954 and spoke of him with admiration. During the war they both believed in dialogue and in protecting civilians and schools. They met several times in Algiers, including in May 1958, which is when this photo was taken.

In his preface to "The Poor Man's Son,  Camus wrote :

"I love this land, and I am of this land. And because I love it, I do not want it to be torn apart.   Mouloud Feraoun tells us about this land with a truth that is rare. He speaks of the poor, of the village, of children and of work. He does not complain. He shows.There is in this book a dignity and a modesty that command respect. It is the book of a man who has known misery and who has not been embittered by it.  This is the voice of Algeria itself, the silent Algeria, the one that works and suffers and hopes."

Camus  put Feraoun on the map as without Camus’s name, a Kabyle teacher’s novel might never have been published in Paris in the 1950s.  Camus said Feraoun wasn’t writing politics, he was writing life. Daily life. Later in letters Camus called Feraoun “my brother.” Not because they agreed on everything, but because they both loved Algeria and hated seeing it bleed. Feraoun was deeply moved by the preface. He kept it with the book for the rest of his life.

Mouloud Feraoun was assassinated on March 15, 1962 for being moderate and pro talks. He and five other education inspectors were killed at a meeting in El Biar, Algiers, just days before the ceasefire that ended the war. His ,"Journal" , published after his death, remains one of the most important accounts of that period.

( Avtar Mota )

PS

Kabylia Berbers

The Kabyles are Berbers who live mainly in Kabylia, a mountainous region east of Algiers in Algeria. They call themselves Izwawen and speak Taqbaylit, a Tamazight dialect. For centuries they lived in village communities with strong traditions of democracy, agriculture, and olive cultivation. Kabylia is known for its resistance to outside rule , from Romans to Ottomans to French colonization. The region produced major writers like Mouloud Feraoun and Mouloud Mammeri who documented Kabyle life. Today Kabyles are central to the Berber cultural movement, fighting to preserve language, music, and identity. They are largely Muslim, known for hospitality, poetry, and strong community ties.

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